7900GT: Unlocking the Beast Within Your Cue
Power and heat output-wise, I measured with my Clamp AMP Meter and below are some rough numbers. These figures are indicative of the card's power consumption and heat output when running 3D Mark 06 at 1280x1024. Of course when you increase the image settings, the power and heat will be slightly higher.
| Power Consumption/Heat Output/Chart | |
| 0 | |
| Geforce 7900GT @ Default voltage/Speed | 64 watts |
| Geforce 7900GT @ 745MHz 1.5v | 87 watts |
| Geforce 7900GT @ 780MHz 1.6v | 101 watts |
| Geforce 7900GT @ 800MHz 1.7v | 111 watts |
How about some practical application of this jug of GPU power? Well, we could game stably at 785MHz core and 1020MHz Memory artifact-free the whole day. I checked out how this improved my gaming experience for 2 games, Quake 4 and FEAR.
That's a huge difference, from 50+ frames per second, our VR-Zone OC Edition bumped frame rates to 80+! A 50% increase in performance there! Didn't cost much as well.
Sure, you definitely need some basic electronic skills to bring this card up to this kind of speed, but if you think about it, it's a lot less skills and effort involved compared to yester months. Funny how these things catch up wih us, just a few months ago, multiple compressors and other exotic forms of cooling were needed to hit this kind of speed:
What was needed a few months back
Now you don't even need to go water-cooling:
These cards are one of the most overclockable cards on air if you do it right. It will be fun to put 2 of these MHz monsters in SLI. What I find attractive about these cards is how accessible these clock speeds are. You don't need watercooling for it, just good air-cooling. And the SevenTeam 480W power supply we used during testing is more than enough to keep the card stable. A pity the voltage mod is not as simple as a pencil stroke or a BIOS flash. Share your overclocking results with us here.













